Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad has left the board of the Swedish furniture brand,
seven months after the 87-year-old insisted that he was "too busy to die"
and had no plans to retire.

Mr Kamprad resigned from his role as chairman of Inter Ikea on Wednesday. He will be replaced by his youngest son, Mathias.

Ikea said the board changes formed part of a “generational shift that has been prepared for and ongoing for some years”, while the man whose initials form half of the company he founded in 1943 insisted he had no intention of shying away. “I will continue to spend time in the stores and in the factories to work with people and help achieve constant improvement,” he said on Wednesday. “Our journey has just started.”

Born on a Swedish farm in 1926, Kamprad began his entrepreneurial career by buying matches, pens, ties and stickers in bulk and selling them at a profit, using the local milk van to deliver orders each morning.

He stumbled upon the idea of selling flat-pack furniture in 1956 when an employee had to take the legs off a table to squeeze it into a customer’s car.

The flat-pack revolution that ensued would eventually turn Ikea into a multi-billion pound corporation and propel him to the ranks of the super-rich. In 2006, he became the world’s fourth richest man behind Bill Gates, Carlos Slim and Warren Buffett, and has a current net worth of around $3.3bn (£2.15bn), according to Forbes.

Despite his riches, Kamprad’s frugal reputation remains strong. The man who once flew into a rage when he discovered that the furniture at Ikea’s head office had been replaced with “extravagant” black and varnished beech items from his own stores lives in a modest bungalow in Switzerland and can reportedly be found lurking at his local market near closing time, when sellers are more likely to drop prices.

Kamprad only gave up the Volvo 240 GL he owned for two decades when he was persuaded that driving it was too dangerous, and was once refused entry to a business awards ceremony because he arrived on the bus.

Kamprad’s philosophy, like Ikea’s, is simple. Buy cheap, sell cheap, and keep people in stores. Kamprad once explained to the New York Times why Ikea’s 338 stores were so child-friendly.

“We want people to spend two or three hours in the store and see what we have,” he said. “Who can make a decision with a five-year-old clinging to their knees?”

Company doctrine is enshrined in Kamprad’s The Testament of a Furniture Dealer. The 44-page document, which many refer to as the “Ikea Bible”, describes “wasting resources as “a mortal sin” and “one of the greatest diseases of mankind”. His no-waste mantra helped Ikea to report an annual net profit of €3.2bn (£2.7bn) last year.

Last October, Kamprad dismissed suggestions that he intended to step down. “I have so much work to do and no time to die,” he said. Kamprad has also faced harsh criticism for his past ties to the Nazi youth movement during World War II. After his involvement became public in 1994, he sent a letter to Ikea employees to explain how in “my greatest failure” he had been close to the openly Nazi group Nysvenska. Mr Kamprad said he now recognised “that was my stupidest error.”

Mathias Kamprad, 43, said on Wednesday that he was “honoured and excited” about his new role. The younger Kamprad spent four years with Habitat, the British furniture chain founded by Sir Terence Conran and owned by the Kamprad family until 2009, before moving back to Ikea’s Swedish division.